Newstalk film critic Philip Molloy, host of The Picture Show, is live in studio every Wednesday on The Right Hook, to go through the new releases of the week, checking out what's on the small screen too, and answering your questions. Tune in live from 6.30pm, or listen back to the podcasts. Here's what he thought of this week's fare:
Far from the Madding Crowd is a handsome, straightforward reworking of the Thomas Hardy novel and the John Schlesinger film set in late 19th century southwest England about a proud “woman farmer” and the three men (a shepherd, a property owner, and a soldier) who court her.
Bathsheba Everdene (Carey Mulligan) is left 1,000 acres and a big, sprawling manor house by the uncle who helped to raise her – she is a sharp, intelligent and an independent-minded woman and the inheritance helps to make her more so.
As adapted by David Nichols and directed by the Danish filmmaker Thomas Vinterberg (The Celebration, The Hunt), Far from the Madding Crowd looks and feels quite modern in its approach. Bathsheba’s attitudes and her development as a woman are pointedly reflected in both her relationships and views of the three men, although the self-serving Sergeant Troy appears under-developed.
Unfriended is a mix between a found-footage film and a reworking of Agatha Christie’s And then There Were None for the social-media age. Six teenagers convene on Skype for a late-night chat, only to be interrupted by what seems like a mocking virus that somehow holds them responsible for the death of a school friend who killed herself after being bullied online.
The whole movie takes place on interlocking Skype screens as the increasingly more terrified friends respond both to each other and the taunts of the intruder while more and more details about their background relationships are revealed.
The movie employs an arsenal of classic scare tactics but it is never creepier than when it uses the cruel taunts, gleeful insults and ugly threats that are the Internet bully’s stock in trade. In many ways, Unfriended is an inventive, computer age exercise in suspense and it, mostly, works.
Made by the low-budget horror studio Blum House Productions for $1m, it has already grossed more than $24m in the US.
Get up and Go, which was first shown at the Cork Film Festival last November, is the story of a Dublin guitarist and singer (Peter Coonan) who abandons his girlfriend (Sarah McCall) when she tells him she is pregnant and persists in his ambition to go off to London to try to make it as a musician.
He needs €1000 and the movie follows his attempts to raise the cash with the aid of his best friend, a would be stand-up comic (Killian Scott) during the course of a single evening and night in Dublin.
Get up and Go is constructed as a kind of dark-night-of-the-soul as the two men face what they are and how they are seen as they go searching for the money, but whose ambitions may not be able to support their goals.
The dialogue, by writer/director Peter Grant, is too flat and unfunny to invest the storyline and the characters with the colour to provoke real audience interest and the situations too often feel contrived and dull in the way they are structured.
Coonan and Scott - who have worked together in Love/Hate - deserve better and the four actresses who make up the supporting cast – Emma Eliza Regan, Gemma Leah Deveraux, Sarah McCall and Sarah Lloyd Gregory - make credible and convincing contributions.
